Looking out through the large picture window at the back of my house, I had a view through a little wood of Japanese oaks, mountain cherries and chestnuts of our small vegetable plot, a lovely wide hay meadow and more woods clothing the foothills ...

It was 1954 and the summer holidays were over. The family had moved a few miles south from Tewkesbury to Cheltenham in the beautiful county of Gloucestershire in the west of England, and I had been transferred from the one town’s boys grammar school ...

In the little woods just behind my house I have a big wooden outdoor bath and a sauna, with lockers beside the sauna door for people to put their towels and clothes in. That may sound great — but since the spring of 2008 ...

About 20 years ago I had a large pond dug in our Afan woods up here in the Nagano Prefecture hills. It was in a place that was always waterlogged when the snow melted, and in spring there were lots of puddles that became ...

In national parks, gardens, woodlands and any other places where people frequently walk in natural settings, the pathways and places where they gather pose many problems to owners, managers and anybody who is concerned with the comfort and safety of the visitors and also ...

Although there was very little snow this winter here where I live in the Nagano Prefecture hills, it was still good to have an excuse to get away from the cold, and the excuse this time was to present a prize for the writer ...

Last month, thanks to a very generous donation, we were able to add another whopping 119,088 sq. meters to our Afan Woodland Trust down the road from my home in the Nagano Prefecture hills outside Kurohime. This brings our total to 296,070 sq. meters ...

In Britain when I was a lad in the 1940s and ’50s, horses were still a common sight in the streets. Although horse-drawn carriages had pretty well vanished except for those used for ceremonial purposes, delivery wagons ladened with milk, coal and beer were ...

I was down in Kyushu with some Japanese friends last year, just sipping a few drinks and chatting. The conversation turned to kabu and became very serious and somewhat gloomy. Quite honestly, I wasn’t really following it all, but I felt I had to ...

The Christmas season may be grinding ever closer, and the creation in the photograph below is almost the right color and shape, but it’s most certainly not a Christmas pudding. Just now, the woods are carpeted with fallen leaves, and as there is a ...